Create Uniqueness by Riccardo Pozzoli

Author:Riccardo Pozzoli [Riccardo Pozzoli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2019-08-02T20:13:55+00:00

Different is beautiful

The fierce competition faced by businesses today can only be circumvented through differentiation, which is the main route to gaining a market share and asserting yourself. Marketing guru Jack Trout has summarized this principle in the famous formula ‘differentiate or die’.

When we created Foorban, Marco, Stefano and I kept it in mind, trying to imagine something completely different from what the Italian market offered and create a niche that did not exist. After having conceived of the initial idea – that is, trying to do something in the field of food delivery in Milan, which in our opinion still offered so many opportunities – we looked around. The players that already operated in this sector were all very large, very entrenched and, above all, had huge capital. So we couldn’t even think of competing with them, mimicking them, in their own back yard: our resources, insufficient compared to theirs, would never permit us to do so. The only way we could compete was to try something different.

First, we identified the weak point of our competitors, which in our opinion was the delivery of the lunch. Because of their business model – customers consult the complete list of restaurants that deliver to their address, choose from the dishes offered by the restaurant they prefer, order and wait for the order to be delivered, all through their smartphones or computers – the choices for the customer are very complicated and delivery times become extended. At lunchtime, people, who are mostly workers on a lunchbreak from their office, are usually in a hurry and do not want to complicate their lives by having to choose from infinitely varied menus. In short, for a lunch it would be sufficient to be able to choose from a few simple and linear menus, offering healthy, light and good food. We understood that our product should reflect these aspects and stand out thanks to its speed and ease of use compared to other players in the market.

Of course, it was necessary to develop a completely different approach in terms of communication as well. Since the larger resources of the other players enabled them to choose an aggressive approach (pervasive advertising campaigns with public transport and building façades plastered with their billboards), we went in the opposite direction, with communication based only on word of mouth through social networks. Among other things, our competitors cannot communicate by focusing on the product, because they deliver the food prepared by so many different restaurants and, therefore, if the customer enjoys a good dish delivered from a certain restaurant, he or she will speak well – quite rightly – of the restaurant, but not necessarily of those who delivered it to them. We have done what other players cannot do: cook well and speed up the delivery as much as possible, creating an absolutely unique service in a market like Milan.

And there is already someone who has chosen to copy us and so is not following a path of uniqueness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.